The Ménagerie and the Great Glasshouses: Zarafa, Rilke's Panther and the End of the Walk
Why is it significant?
Follow the paths among the little brick pavilions and wire enclosures, where red pandas doze in the branches and orangutans watch you through the glass with an expression of polite pity. It feels like a village zoo. In fact it is one of the oldest zoos in the world still open, founded in 1794.
Key Facts
| Place | The Ménagerie and the Great Glasshouses: Zarafa, Rilke's Panther and the End of the Walk |
|---|---|
| Address | Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, 57 Rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84550, 2.36060 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the paths among the little brick pavilions and wire enclosures, where red pandas doze in the branches and orangutans watch you through the glass with an expression of polite pity. It feels like a village zoo. In fact it is one of the oldest zoos in the world still open, founded in 1794.
Its birth was pure Revolution. The king's menagerie at Versailles had been abandoned, and its few surviving animals were brought here. Then the Paris police seized the bears, monkeys and big cats of travelling showmen who exhibited them in the streets, and delivered them to the botanists, who suddenly found themselves zookeepers. The writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, author of the bestselling romance Paul and Virginia, had run the garden just before and argued hard for a public menagerie.
In 1827 the most famous guest arrived. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, sent King Charles the Tenth a young giraffe, the first ever seen in France. She landed in Marseille, and since no cart could carry her, she walked to Paris, some nine hundred kilometres, escorted by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Paris lost its mind. Women wore their hair piled up high, à la girafe, and giraffe-patterned wallpaper and porcelain filled the shops. Zarafa, as she was later called, lived here for about eighteen years.
Around 1902, a young Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, came here on the advice of his master Rodin, who told him to go and really look at things. He stood in front of a panther pacing behind its bars, and wrote one of the most famous poems in the German language, The Panther: a creature for whom the world has become a thousand bars, and behind them, no world at all. Every caged animal here has had to live with that poem ever since.
On your way out, look south at the great glasshouses, built in the 1830s, among the first large iron-and-glass greenhouses in the world, still steaming with tropical forest. And so the walk that began with a bronze archangel ends with a giraffe and a poet. Between the Roman arena and these cages lie two thousand years of Paris, and you have crossed them on foot in a single afternoon. The Seine is just beyond the gates... take your time.